> Check me if I'm wrong, but the .Net version of Eiffel# has been> shipping for three months now. Yes they faced some serious challenges> getting everything to run, but I don't know that their problems were> any different than those faced by other compiler vendors (including> MSoft.)

I have heard that they had to "modify" some of Eiffel's semantic
because it was not supported by the .NET byte code and virtual machine
(or what they call it these days) the most noticeable being the lack
of multiple inheritance (as I was told that Eiffel normally supports
multiple inheritance - I have never used Eiffel so I do not know if it
is true).

An "interesting" consequence of the porting of programming languages
to the .NET framework is that new ".NET-variation" of each language
will emerge having slightly different syntax/semantic and standard API
in order to fit into constrains imposed by .NET. If Microsoft keeps
their dominant position this could mean that the .NET-variations
slowly will replace the standard language specifications and
effectively become de-facto standards, a bit like it happened when
Delphi became the de-facto standard for Pascal
development. Consequently, these "standards" will have to follow
whatever modifications that Microsoft will introduce to the
..NET-platform in the future, effectively giving Microsoft the control
over the further development of these programming languages. Just a
thought...